Novell Releasing Hula and 200,000+ Lines of Code

H0ek writes "Seems Novell has announced at LinuxWorld Expo that they will be releasing 200,000+ lines of code to the community in the form of a project named Hula(TM). The project is derived from the Novell NetMail product and provides web-based email and calendaring. Seems our boy Nat Friedman has some info on this, too. If you were fortunate enough to get a MyRealBox email account, you will probably know what NetMail is like."

Comments

Released as LGPL - Are you watching, Sun...?

[donnz]

"Licensed as open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL)".

See, that's how it's done. Simple really and no need for weeks of backtracking, bullshit and misleading statements.

And the reason?

[Infinityis]

So what's the rationale behind this? Is it basically the same as catching a fish and throwning it back becasue it was too little? Not enough profits? Are they hoping that open source developers will make as user friendly as Gmail?

Also, how exactly do they transfer it over to open source? Will company employees still head up the project, or do they just pick some leader in the OSS community and declare a project leader?

Re:And the reason?

[dameron]

This is a total stab in the dark but I'm guessing they're really going to be pushing their OpenExchange solution instead.

-dameron

Re:And the reason?

[Nat Friedman]

Open source hasn't yet succeeded in building a collaboration server that people can actually use in a variety of settings. We want to fill this gap with Hula.

We believe that people mainly just want the basics: mail, calendaring, addressbook, maybe shared documents.

The dominant solutions today -- Exchange and Notes -- are built on a 20-year old design that predates the web. They were intended to be platforms on which you could build tools like expense processing, vacation requests, and other things. This was called "workflow."

Today, those functions are all done on internal web sites. It's just better. Who wants to build on the Exchnage "platform" if they don't have to?

But still companies are stuck with these hopelessly big, complex servers, just to do basic email and calendaring. They are expensive, they are heavyweight. They overdeliver.

So what we want to build with Hula is, in a way, the "Firefox" of collaboration servers. Do the basics, and do them extremely well. Provide an extension system so other people can add things if they want.

Dave Camp is the maintainer of Hula; he has a lot of experience in open source and we think he'll guide the project well. Many of the Novell engineers behind the original code (notably David Smith and Rodney Price) are working on the Hula project and will continue to work on it.

We're serious about making Hula work. Stop by #hula on freenode if you want to meet us.

Re:And the reason?

[nine-times]

Of course, we all can't know exactly what the top-execs are really thinking, what's PR and what's for real, but I for one am glad to hear Novell has at least an rookie programmer with that sort of optimism about FOSS. I just hope your attitude is indicative of the general tone over there.

All public indications are that Novell's participation in open-source communities is in earnest, and they've been releasing some pretty good stuff to GPL (YaST, Ximian Exchange connector, now this). I'm really hoping y'all over at Novell succeed in showing that it's possible to play nice, contribute to FOSS, and still get past that old "2) ????" step and see some profit. It could provide a good contrast to other companies who seem to feel like they need to screw over everyone else and stifle their competition in order to succeed.

Anyway, have fun storming the castle!

a reliable alternative to microsoft outlook

[geekschmoe]

I really hope this turns into a reliable alternative to Outlook. Every manager will tell you that they need/rely on Outlook calendering functions.

And every time the server goes down almost every nerd at the place I work (99% UNIX shop) says something about how we need a unix mail server. But that already exists. We need an open source calender server.

Does something like this exist already or is it in the works? Last time I looked I couldn't find anything comparable.

Re:Web-based email? Oh, that's sooo exciting

[Drishmung]

Read the article. It supports web mail---and having used MyRealBox I can say it's quite good. But, it also supports POP3, IMAP, LDAP and webcal.

So, doesn't this now start to sound more like a free Exchange Server replacement?

Outlook integration - OpenConnector.Org

[Kunta Kinte]

For a long time I've thought that a calendar server that integrates with Outlook is the missing killer app for open source.

I thought so too, and started OpenConnector.Org a while ago to fix this.

An Outlook connector would allow the thousands of Microsoft Outlook users to connect to a CalDAV calendar server or something like Hula

Although we've come a long way with the OpenConnector project ( we now have a MAPI Message Store that loads, and lots of code to base the Transport Provider off of...) a full Outlook connector is still a lot more work. Most completed commercial connectors, I've heard are developed by a team of fulltime developers, so help is *always* needed. Even simple things like the network protocol library, which requires no knowledge of Outlook or MAPI.

At any rate, I think it is a good time for internet calendaring, especially with CalDAV coming out with so much support ( OSA Foundation, Oracle, Mozilla, and many others... ), and on track ( 5 drafts in a few months ).